Sholto Byrnes is “rethinking Islamism”
Oh jeezis – the New Statesman is telling us to love sharia now – at least Sholto Byrnes is on the NS blog, and he wouldn’t be doing that if the NS didn’t approve. If you see an article in the Nation telling us to love Nazism you’re entitled to conclude that the Nation has lost its mind and is endorsing Nazism. Same with sharia – and yes they are pretty similar. They at least share a ballpark.
But the very concept of sharia has been so oversimplified by scaremongers that in the popular imagination it is inextricably linked with the punishments of beheading, flogging and amputation for crimes such as theft and adultery, and for which Saudi Arabia has long been notorious.
Yes, that’s right, along with stoning to death, and rules of evidence that mean men accused of rape can just say “I didn’t do it” and get off while the women who make the accusation are then automatically convicted of adultery because after all they have admitted to fornication by accusing the man of rape and the man said he didn’t do it (and the woman forgot to bring along the requisite four men of good character to watch, without whom she has no case), so she must be flogged or perhaps stoned to death. And similar items of limpid justice and fairness.
Then Byrnes quotes Tariq Ramadan saying it’s all a misunderstanding, then Byrnes says it’s all a misunderstanding some more, without ever actually managing to offer a particular example of sharia being a good thing. He says in Malaysia it’s not so bad because it applies only to Muslims (which is dubious itself), but he still doesn’t say why it’s actually good. Then he concludes with a great burst of powerful argument:
Of course, there are plenty who will object to any legal system or way of life that has a religious basis, regardless of how it operates. But the one word that is, above all, associated with sharia, stressed by Ramadan in his writings, Mahathir in his interview with me, by Bernard Lewis in his latest book and by countless others, is “justice”. I think we can agree that it is not just Islamists who are in favour of that.
Lots of people say sharia has something to do with “justice,” therefore…
Oh, god. It’s too depressing.
No wonder old Sholto found that he had difficulties with Does God Hate Women? – and why he misrepresented it! The guy’s an idiot. What is the matter with people? Have they simply gone mad? Or is there something in the water over there? Count the decades. There aren’t many free ones left. Yes, it is too depressing.
It’s also starting to get downright scary. Byrnes’ claim that god is the foundation of our freedoms is on record – here: Keep the Faith. But the sheer volume of outright idiocy about religion in the public media is, I think, growing, and it is starting to be very worrying. There seems to be a concerted campaign to suggest that religion is not only not a threat, but that re-establishing religious control over secular life would be a positively good thing. Whether it’s the pope or Islam, doesn’t really matter. We heard it during the UK election campaign. And now, repeatedly, we hear that it’s all just a misunderstanding. Religion is really all about goodness and justice. When will they ever learn?
That’s nice: if islamists say that ‘sharia’ is ‘justice’ we shouldn’t have anything to object. Nazis were also doing justice to the German/Aryan people, maybe we shouldn’t have objected either.
And another thing –
Notice that sloppy equation, as if legal systems and ways of life were much of a muchness. So, ho hum, being a hippy is the same kind of thing as living under sharia.
Eric, I’m pretty sure you’re right about the public media – I think all these rebarbative “On Faith” sections and the like are new and growing. I just read somewhere that CNN dropped the section on science from its website and added a “Faith” blog.
Re: Eric
When will they ever learn? Let me tell you a story about a local case.
The case in Ontario, Canada, is quite revealing.
During the provincial election campaign in 2007, the ruling Liberal Party was polling in the mid to upper 30% range while the main opposition, the Progressive Conservative Party (PC), was slightly higher and expected to gain support throughout the campaign. The leader of the PC, John Tory, introduced a platform that included equal funding for religious schools (the Catholics had been granted public education funding in one form or another since the 1850s). “We will ensure that students from the widest range of faith and cultural backgrounds are part of public education while still respecting unique aspects of their faith and culture,” he said. Sounds good, right?
In the late 80’s the province toyed with the idea of allowing sharia law to be treated the same way legally that a few other specific religious groups had been allowed, but the public support evaporated when well organized groups formed to fight the proposal that were very effective at framing the issue as one of undermining women’s rights. With the growth of evangelical christianity in these parts, Tory assumed there might be more support for the fair funding of religious schools. He was wrong.
Surprising to many in 2007 was just how unpopular that specific PC platform was with over 75% of people strongly against such a move. The PCs went on to lose the election handily, but one of the key changes after the election was introduced and passed by the Liberal Party. They rescinded the 1991 Ontario Arbitration Act, which gave legal force to a long-standing practice of allowing any faith-based tribunals to resolve family matters such as divorce and custody.
The moral of the story? Criticism works, and it works because people like you will continue to criticize the insertion of religious belief into the public domain and it carries with it a very real cost in someone’s rights. By keeping the inherent weaknesses of religious belief in the public domain front and center, the message will be that when one proposes inserting religion belief into the public domain for any reason, one will receive sustained criticism and lose public support.
The reason why Sholto does not include a particular example of sharia being a good thing is because on the scale of justice and human rights respectful to all it is a failure everywhere all the time and prepares the legal system to inflict human rights abuses and violations. It serves misogynistic goals rather well, but that’s not the kind of justice that will sell well in the West when half the population can and will vote if motivated. Just ask John Tory… the ex-leader of a once popular political party.
Cheer up, the wonderfully strident Maryam Namazie is organising a rally to clobber the sort of nonsense peddled by Sholto Byrnes:
http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/20-june-2010/
And the ‘faith’ articles attract lots of derisive comments. And Stephen Hawkins’ remark that science (and reason) will win is being reported, even by religion-slobbering media.
Doh. Stephen Hawking, of course.
What a wonderful future we have in store for us. Introduce laws that make criticism of religion a hate crime, then put the law on a religious footing so that any criticism of the law is anti-religious … and therefore a hate crime.
Oh, I dunno. Sholto should not be just dismissed. After all, Sharia could be modified in a positive direction.
For a start, imagine the effect on the Muslim world if a few of those fond of genitally mutilating girls were publicly stoned to death.
Might give the rest some pause.
;-)
Out of 27 comments from readers, only one sort of half supported Sholto, and that comment was from a Muslim!
The only commenter Sholto has responded to (to date) is the bloke who said Sholto on Sharia was the reason he was no longer in the market for New Statesman. Ironic confirmation of Marx’s observation that man’s being determines his consciousness.
(Well, true at least in Sholto’s case.)
What is this word “justice”? Seriously, it’s a very contested word. Arguably it merely means acting in accordance with the law, whatever the law happens to be (rather than acting on, say, whim). While it may be a good thing, prima facie, if everyone acted in accordance with the law, in that it gives some predictability to things and reduces the general fear level, it might not pan out so well if the law is riddled with all sorts of draconian or discriminatory or simply irrational provisions.
If some “thicker” understanding of “justice” is intended, it’s not at all obvious whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. We’d need to know just what understanding of justice is in play here. Don’t buy it without checking its contents.
Readers of the Staggers, like readers of the Graun, not so soft-headed as the editors. Funny.
Russell, surely justice to have any <i>thicker</i> meaning must have some measure of fairness (equitableness) rather than <i>merely</i> adhering to the law.
tildeb … maybe not. A thicker concept of justice may mean all sorts of things. It may mean giving people what is thought to be “due” to them in some sense that is supposed to precede the legal system. That may not involve anything egalitarian. More may be due to men, or to people with allegedly superior arete, or to people who serve God in the proper manner, or to people who get in first and grab the land. Less may be due to women, or to “natural slaves”, or to infidels, or whatever. The possibilities are endless.
I’d say that it tells you absolutely nothing if someone claims to be committed to justice. Not unless you already know that their concept of what is “just” is very similar to your own. Anyone at all can claim to be committed to, or to love, or to be in favour of, justice. It’s not the slightest evidence that you’re dealing with someone whose heart is in the right place, or whatever Byrnes thinks it suggests about supporters of Sharia law.
Well exactly – that’s why it’s such an inane thing for Byrnes to say. To some people “justice” is stoning to death a girl who was raped. Obviously that’s not what Byrnes means by it, but if he doesn’t realize that it is what some people mean by it – he has no business writing about sharia at all. He’s dangerous.
As has been noted, “justice” is one of those words, like “freedom,” that can be defined in quite a few different ways. Many religious people go on about how they are being deprived of their “freedom of religion” by not being able to put all aspects of their religious worldview and morals into real-world practice (e.g., shari’ah, “Xian values,” halakha, etc. “It’s a violation of my freedom of religion to prevent me from beating up or berating Sabbath-breakers, gays, uppity women and/or atheists!”
I recall Syed Qutb, godfather of Islamism, writing in Milestones that to him establishing a truly Islamic state under shari’ah would give man “freedom” from jahiliyya, “ignorance,” and free them from being enslaved to humans and human-made law. In other words, man is only free when he is completely free to obey Allah’s law. (I remember this because it seemed so positively Orwellian, even at the time and place I read it — in the local mosque library. Kind of like how some devout Muslim women trilling about the “freedom” and “liberation” Islam gives them… Byrnes is a twit (to put it mildly) if he doesn’t understand this.
Oh, yeah…and the remark about how shari’ah in Malaysia is OK because it’s only confined to Muslims brings to mind the Lina Joy case, where the shari’ah court wouldn’t let her leave Islam! What kind of a catch-22 is that: “You’re under our authority from birth, simply because you happened to be born in a particular religious community, and if you decide otherwise as an adult, we’re the ones who get to decide if you can leave.”
But looking at that sentence in the original blog entry again, I gagged for another reason:
I’ve seen this again and again among defenders of separate, religious legal systems. Note that the subjects that would concern women the most are glossed over as…well, not anything really “important” like criminal punishments, just little matters about inheritance, divorce, child custody, in which women are put at an enormous disadvantage. But hey, those are just “women’s issues” and can be easily dispensed with, so as to leave the civil courts free for “real” issues.
Lisa (or Ophelia, or anyone), what do you think the locus classicus for this view might be – I mean the view that you rightly attack in the last para of #16? It would be worth knowing so we know who to cite when we attack it in more formal settings.
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That’s actually an interesting question, Russell, but I’m not quite sure. It’s a widespread notion, though. The idea that women’s concerns are not taken especially seriously by society, as compared with “male” concerns (which are likely to be taken as ipso facto “universal”) is one of the bedrock ideas of feminism — even among highly educated Westerners, women’s issues are sometimes seen as some kind of specialized “interest/identity group” politics rather than a universal human rights concern, given that they affect 50% of the populace. Women’s rights in e.g., Algeria or Iran after the revolution were considered to be of secondary importance to the independence struggle or the struggle against colonialism/imperialism/counterrevolutionaries, so feminists there were told to subordinate their “petty” concerns to the cause of independence/revolution. (I’ve seen this mindset more times than I’d like to count among leftist “anti-imperialists” and “post-colonialists,” for whom feminism is considered merely a concern of “bourgeois” Western or “Western-corrupted” women.) The mere fact that Byrnes is totally ignoring all the feminist concerns in family law in his embrace of shari’ah, only attempting to defend it against things like chopping off hands and beheadings says it all — it’s just not that important to him.
Russell, Susan Moller Okin argued in a book on liberalism (which I haven’t read) that exceptionalism about the family has always been central to liberalism and that that is (obviously, except of course not obviously) a problem. I get this second-hand from Nussbaum’s essay on the subject, which I’ve quoted often here – so that might be one place to look for a locus classicus. But I suspect that they’re so numerous it’s hard to pin down one.
Or maybe you mean one specifically to do with sharia within liberal societies? I don’t know but I suspect that one is diffuse too. Lots of Sholto-types started saying it all at once.
I wonder if Kenan Malik would know. He has a well-honed sense of how this stuff has changed.
Yeah, I’m familar with Okin’s work (to an extent). What I meant was, who first said: “It doesn’t matter if we introduce Sharia law because it only affects a few areas like family law.” I guess Okin might have examples, though she was writing before the arguments were framed in quite this way. IIRC, her stuff wasn’t specifically about introducing Shariah law but more generally about a tension between multiculturalism and the interests of women. And then of course there are issues about whether the state should intervene when those women are genuinely consenting to certain arrangements, whatever “genuinely consenting” means: Karen Green has written about this, criticising Okin on roughly Millian grounds. But even if Karen has a point – and I’m as good a Millian liberal as she is – there remains this other point that if we allow Sharia law some official status lots of women who either don’t consent or are not well-informed will be stuck with a body of law that is less protective of their interests than modern, secular Western law has become. I doubt that Karen would consider that unimportant, but it seems that lots of people do. Sholto Byrnes is now revealed as one of them.
Anyway, I’ll go back to that debate, and also see what Nussbaum says. I’m sure she discusses this stuff somewhere in her book on freedom of religion, but I suspect she may not be entirely on “our” side of the issue (I’ve read the book twice, but some of it tends to skate off me, as she’s far more accommodationist of religious wants than I am). I also have a nice fat book by political philosopher Brian Barry on the more general questions, just waiting for me to read it. I gather that Barry is on “our” side, but you’ll have to await my report.
My fear is that I’ll end up having to read a lot of stuff by Tariq Ramadan and the like. In which case, so be it I suppose.
I was thinking of Okin’s book, which predates “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” – oh go look up the title, woman.
Justice, Gender, and the Family. Nussbaum says she severely criticizes liberal theory for its neglect of injustice in the family.
Anyway, right, I figured that might be what you meant (who first said that about sharia). I suspect there is no real l.c. but just a lot of people saying it at around the same time. I know I have seen it……….a lot.
Joanne Payton might know. Someone at WLUML might know. Maryam Namazie might know.
The Nussbaum I had in mind is the one in Sex and Social Justice, not the one in the religious freedom book, whom I frankly can’t bear.
OB, that all sounds like good advice and I’ll be sure to take at least some of it. ;)
if old Sholtzy had just stuck to the thing he’s akshully quite good at —- and leave the thinking to proper people.. ‘course.. the great thing about a non shariah penal system is that they don’t go cutting off your hands when they catch you having a crafty little sherman at your favourite website in your de luxe office so, when they shove you down some sharia jail pit you can still play your ‘ol bass guitar..